Perhaps the English title for Jia Zhang-Ke's movie Sanxia haoren ( Still Life ) was meant ironically, for life is anything but still in this movie.

Starring Han Sanming and Zhao Tao. Written and directed by Jia Zhang-Ke. In Mandarin with English subtitles. 108 minutes. At the Royal. PG

Perhaps the English title for Jia Zhang-Ke's movie Sanxia haoren (Still Life) was meant ironically, for life is anything but still in this movie.

The craft moving up and down the Yangtze River, the ever-panning camera that takes in all in its innocent gaze, the movement of people from one place or occupation to another, all make a metaphor for a radical change that shakes people out of their identities.

In Still Life, people are literally displaced, removed from their homes and relocated before the construction of the Three Gorges Dam necessitates the flooding and obliteration of their lands.

All around Fengjie, signs indicate that with the next phase of construction, waters will rise 156 metres to submerge the 2,000-year-old town. Already, a part of Fengjie has disappeared.

"There, that's all that's left of 5 Granite Place," says a motorcycle driver pointing out to his passenger a bit of concrete sticking up above the water. His passenger is Sanming, a coal miner from Shanxi, who has ferried to Fengjie in search of his daughter, whom he hasn't seen since he parted with his wife 16 years earlier. They once lived at 5 Granite Place.

Sanming (played by Han Sanming) wears the same baleful look through most of his sojourn in Fengjie, where he is advised to get work with the crews tearing down the buildings, swinging sledgehammers under the hot sun like prisoners on a chain gang. His ex-wife might show up again. Yet it is clear that Sanming's soul has come adrift. Nothing that he remembers of Fengjie has remained the same.

Sanming's search is left in abeyance as another seeker comes to town. This is Shen (Zhao Tao), also from Shanxi, a pretty nurse who is looking for her husband. She hasn't laid eyes on him for two years, since he left for some high-level job in the district, and she suspects he has taken up with another woman. She gets help from an archaeologist friend of the couple, a man who is literally preserving the past with an excavation of a Han dynasty site.

The town crumbles bit by bit. Many buildings are still standing, their outer walls removed so that private domesticity is revealed in what seems a shameful display. Thuggish demolition gangs remove the citizens house by house. The government officials are corrupt. The residents are helpless in the face of economic progress: all this is written in the passive features of Sanming and Shen.

A gulf of silence separates Shen and her husband when she finally catches up with him. The empty landscapes and dark interiors where something bad always seems about to happen are reminiscent of Antonioni at his most existential.

Nothing much actually happens in Still Life, and yet one is left with a deep feeling of irrevocable loss and destructive change only heightened by the chirpy tourist patter and government promotional talk about the great Three Gorges Dam.

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